In an ever increasingly difficult nut to crack, ‘making it’ as a club, festival or events DJ has never been harder.

This follows on a post from a while back ‘Go beyond house music‘. With advances in technology making easy for a normal person (:)) to become a DJ competition for DJ slots is fierce. With this in mind I believe you need to specialise and learn the genre inside out to become an authority in order to gain any kind of traction. Also there is the who you know, not what you know that probably trumps all of this anyway. The sad fact is of course, that in my estimations over 90% of DJs work for free and a large portion of that upsetting number actually promote the event and are forced to sell tickets! It’s a sorry state when the person annoyingly propped in the toilets forcing fragrances on you earns more than the DJ actually entertaining the crowd! Wow what has the industry come to! This will definitely be the subject of another article, watch this controversial space!

I myself was lucky enough to do quite well financially from doing what I love the most. I’ll be honest, I have ‘worked’ for free in recent times spinning records and rocking people’s nights but to me now it is not ‘work’. I am selective where and what I play and this suits me fine. My advice is to follow your own path and do it for the right reasons! If you go into DJing to make money, you are doing it for the wrong reasons and missing out.

The other thing you could do to get paid gigs though is stand on the booth throwing cake at the crowd or even do an aerobics routine around the CDJs and other button-based syncing units. Or maybe throw on a giant mouse mask, maybe even don a stormtrooper costume. All these ideas seem to have brought the cream of DJ talent to the surface. And they say the art of DJing is lost eh!

I’m going to cut this one short as the fancy dress shop closes at 5pm. See you on stage at the weekend, you won’t recognise me though!

About VSD

VSD (Vinyl Spin Division) is run by Matt Clover (England) and Darren Tolley (Australia). To ultra passionate vinyl-headed DJs with a combined spinning experience of over 50 years! This site has been created to bring together the brother and sisterhood of vinyl DJs sharing experiences and knowledge. We welcome all feedback so get involved.